“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from ignorance, but from knowing too much. From watching the news and feeling, somewhere deep in your chest, that you have seen this before. Not the specific faces. Not the exact borders on the map. But the shape of it. The logic of it. The rationalisations offered by the powerful. The silence of those who benefit.
I have spent a long time trying to understand whether humanity has genuinely progressed in the five centuries since European powers began their project of global conquest, or whether we have simply learned to dress the same violence in cleaner language. I do not ask this question from detachment. I ask it because the answer determines whether hope is rational or merely a comfort that we extend to ourselves so we can sleep.
Look at what is unfolding before us. Gaza was reduced to rubble while the world debated the legality of each bomb as it debated the legality of each clause in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a homeland to one people upon land where another already lived.
Algeria knows this arithmetic. So does the Amritsar of 1919, where British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd and then filed reports about the security situation. The deliberation was always there. The dying was always faster than the deliberation.
Ukraine bled dry by an imperial neighbour who speaks of historical unity while practising historical subjugation, as the same neighbour spoke of Slavic brotherhood while engineering the Holodomor, a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s through the deliberate seizure of their grain. Empire has always been most dangerous when it reaches for the language of family.
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Venezuela was strangled by United States and allied sanctions because it refused to be obedient, as Guatemala was strangled in 1954 when it elected a government that dared to redistribute idle land from the United Fruit Company, and as Chile was strangled in the early 1970s until a democratically elected socialist president was replaced by a general willing to fill stadiums with the bodies of his opponents. The method updates.
The message to the Global South remains constant: sovereignty is permitted, but only within limits we will define for you. Iran attacked because it dared to be sovereign, as Mosaddegh’s Iran was overthrown in 1953 when it nationalised its oil, and as Congo’s Lumumba was eliminated in 1961 when he attempted to govern his nation’s resources for his nation’s people.
Resource sovereignty has always been the line that the powerful will not allow the powerless to cross. These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different languages, across different centuries, with different flags. The essential grammar has not changed.
Colonialism did not end. It evolved
We were taught that colonialism ended. Flag ceremonies were held. Independence days were declared. Speeches were given about sovereignty and self-determination. And in the formal, legal sense, the colonial era closed.
But independence removed the coloniser’s flag, not the global hierarchy that made colonisation possible in the first place.
The tools changed. Colonial administrations became International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs. Tribute became debt. Missionary ideology became information warfare. Viceroys became proxy governments.
Military garrisons became military bases on leased land. The architecture of control was modernised, made more efficient, stripped of the embarrassing racial vocabulary that had become politically inconvenient after Auschwitz made white supremacy unseemly in polite company.
Palestine offers the most clarifying example. Here is a population living under military occupation for over half a century. Their movement is controlled. Their water is controlled. Their airspace is controlled. Their economy is controlled. Their political existence is denied.
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The methods have names drawn from international law: “closure,” “blockade,” “administrative detention,” but for the person trying to travel to a hospital, or plant a field, or simply move through the land where their grandparents were born, these legal categories are irrelevant. What they experience is occupation.
What they experience is dispossession. It has historical precedents that stretch back hundreds of years, and their names, Algeria, the Congo, Rhodesia, and the Americas, are not subtle.
Selective outrage
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the response from the West was swift, coordinated, and morally clear. Sanctions. Military aid. Refugee corridors. Media saturation. Declarations that an invasion of a sovereign nation was intolerable. I do not dispute that it was intolerable. I do not dispute that Ukrainians deserve solidarity and support.
But I cannot pretend not to notice the contrast.
When journalists and politicians described Ukrainian refugees as “people like us,” when commentators noted with surprise that these were “civilised” people fleeing war, the unspoken comparison was explicit enough.
The refugees from Syria, from Yemen, from Sudan, from Afghanistan, whose deaths registered as acceptable losses in Western moral accounting, were being quietly defined as different in kind. Their suffering was the background. Ukrainian suffering was the foreground.
This is not an argument against supporting Ukraine. It is an argument that the selective application of moral outrage is not a flaw in the current system; it is the system. International norms around sovereignty and human rights are real, but their enforcement has always tracked alliance, not principle. This is not cynicism. It is history. And history is not kind to those who refuse to read it.
Venezuela has been subjected to sanctions so comprehensive that they constitute collective punishment of an entire population. Iran is encircled and strangled. Cuba has lived under an economic siege for six decades. These are not countries accused of genocide. They are countries accused of refusing to align with Washington.
The offence is sovereignty. The punishment is misery. The mechanism is presented in legal and financial language, not the language of empire, but the people going without medicine understand the distinction is cosmetic.
Role of race
Does race still govern this? This is the question I find myself returning to, and the one I find most difficult to answer with certainty. Classical colonialism was explicitly racial in its ideology. The hierarchy of people was stated openly, codified in science, taught in schools, pand reached from pulpits. It provided the moral justification for conquest: those people were lesser, and therefore to govern them was a gift.
That language has been abandoned. But the hierarchies it produced have not been dissolved. They have been institutionalised. The Global South inherits borders drawn by European powers to serve European interests. It inherits debt structures designed to maintain dependency. It inherits the Permanent Five seats on the Security Council, a body whose architecture reflects the world as it existed after 1945, frozen in the power relations of that moment.
Today’s hierarchy operates through military dominance, economic leverage, technological control, and the power to determine which suffering is visible. But the correlation between that hierarchy and the old racial hierarchy is not accidental. It is the direct consequence of centuries in which race was used to concentrate wealth, land, and power in European hands.
The world did not become race-neutral when the explicit language of race was retired. It became a world in which the advantages accumulated through racial hierarchy continued to compound, invisibly, efficiently, without needing to name themselves.
When I look at whose deaths trigger Security Council vetoes, whose refugees are welcomed and whose are turned back, whose wars are called wars and whose are called counterterrorism, military operations, or interventions, I do not see a racially neutral pattern. I see a pattern that would have been entirely legible to someone living in 1880.
The Never-changing justification
Every occupying power in history has explained itself in the same terms. Security. Stability. Civilization. Protection. The language is always defensive, always reluctant, always burdened with a sorrow the occupier feels for having been forced into this position by the behaviour of those they are controlling.
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The British in India spoke of the burden of bringing order to a subcontinent incapable of governing itself. The French in Algeria described their mission as civilizational. The Belgians in the Congo presented themselves as liberators of a people from barbarism.
American interventions across Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have been explained, in each generation, as defensive responses to threats that required preemptive action or impositions of democracy and freedoms to the people who direly needed them.
I am not arguing that security concerns are never genuine. I am arguing that genuine security concerns have been used, across five centuries, to justify extraordinary systems of control over other people’s lives.
The pattern is too consistent to be coincidental. The justification has become a genre, one whose conventions are so familiar that those offering it no longer seem to notice they are performing a script that has been delivered, word for word, in every language of empire.
What has changed
I have been speaking in dark terms, and I want to pause here, because intellectual honesty requires me to hold the contradictions rather than resolve them into a clean indictment.
Things have changed. The formal abolition of slavery, however incomplete in its economic aftermath, was not inevitable. It was fought for, against the interests of enormous power, by people who had every reason to believe they would lose. Decolonisation movements succeeded in dismantling the formal empire in a generation, against odds that were, on paper, impossible. The human rights framework that exists today, however selectively enforced, did not exist before the twentieth century. The idea that a government could be held internationally accountable for what it did to its own citizens was genuinely new.
And there is something else that has changed: visibility. A phone in the pocket of a person in Gaza, in Mariupol, in Caracas, in Tehran, can transmit what is happening to millions of people in seconds.
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The powerful have not lost their power, but they have partially lost their ability to conduct it in darkness. The documentation of atrocity has accelerated. The audiences for that documentation have grown. The moral imagination of ordinary people has been enlarged, even when their governments have not followed.
These are not small things. They represent genuine moral progress, won at enormous cost by people whose names most of us do not know.
Is it enough?
The problem is that progress and insufficiency can coexist. Standards can rise and still not rise fast enough to protect the vulnerable in the present moment. Humanity can develop moral frameworks it has not yet learned to live inside.
Children in Gaza are dying while the world holds conferences. Farmers in Venezuela and Cuba cannot access medicine because of financial instruments crafted in Washington. Families in Iran watch their savings dissolve because of sanctions calibrated to maximise civilian pain while preserving deniability about intent.
These things are happening in a world that also has the International Criminal Court, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, and five hundred years of accumulated testimony about what an empire does to the bodies and spirits of the people it governs.
We know. That is perhaps the most disturbing development of this era. We have always known, at some level. But now we know in real time. We watch it happen. We debate it. We share the images. And the dying continues.
The core injustice of our moment is not that domination exists; it always has. It is that domination is normalised, legalised, and selectively condemned depending on who exercises it and against whom. The rules-based international order is real. And it has exceptions. And the exceptions are not random. They map with uncomfortable precision onto the old hierarchies of who matters and who does not.
A personal accounting
I began by asking whether humanity has progressed. I end without a clean answer, because the truth refuses one.
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We have built moral standards that did not previously exist. We have not yet built the political will to apply them consistently. We have made explicit racial hierarchy socially unacceptable. We have not dismantled the structures that the racial hierarchy built.
We have created international institutions that enshrine the principle of sovereignty. We have watched those institutions fail, systematically, when sovereignty conflicts with the interests of the powerful.
What I am left with, after all of this, is not nihilism. Nihilism would be easier. What I am left with is something more uncomfortable: the recognition that progress is real, and insufficient, and reversible.
That the people who fought for abolition, for independence, for human rights were not naïve, they were necessary. That their victories matter even though those victories have been incomplete and partially subverted. And that the current generation faces the same demand they faced: to refuse to accept what is being normalised.
Empires change uniforms faster than they change behaviour. The vocabulary of domination evolves. The hierarchy remains. And ordinary people, always, in every century, in every language, under every flag, pay the price.
I’m going to close with this: to see this clearly is not despair. It is the beginning of the only response that has ever worked: refusing to look away.
Kennedy Mmari is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Serengeti Bytes, a Dar es Salaam-based communications, public relations and digital media agency. He’s available at kennedy@serengetibytes.com and on X as @KennedyMmari. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please get in touch with our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
